Asbestos Roofing Removal in Hove

The grand part of Hove faces the sea. Brunswick Town, Adelaide Crescent and the Palmeira squares are Regency and early Victorian stucco, most of it split into flats now. Roofing asbestos is not really their story. Head inland though, out towards Hangleton and Portslade, and the picture changes. This is suburban Hove, street after street of interwar and postwar semis with gardens, garages and the small outbuildings that come with them. That is where the cement roofs are.

The material went into roofs from the 1950s into the 1980s, so most of these houses had it added at some point in their first few decades. It turns up on rear extensions, on lean-to additions tacked onto the back of the kitchen, on garden sheds and workshops, and on the larger outbuildings behind the bigger semis. The same grey corrugated sheeting that covers a shed roof also shows up as soffits, gutters and fascia boards tucked under the eaves of these houses, where most people never look twice at it. Asbestos cement was the cheap, fireproof choice for a roof nobody wanted to spend money on, so it ended up on the parts of the house no one looked at: the lean-to over the back door, the workshop at the bottom of the garden, the flat-roofed addition built on later to gain a downstairs room. Forty, fifty, sixty years on, those are exactly the roofs now reaching the end of their life all at once.

This page is about those roofs and roofline pieces, not the standalone lock-up garage that so many of these streets also have. The garage is its own job. Here the focus is everything else with a cement roof or a cement board under the gutter line.

The method is the opposite of a normal strip-out. Cement sheeting is removed in one piece wherever the fixings allow it, never smashed or dropped. Breaking a sheet is what fills the air with fibres, so each one is unbolted, lifted down by hand and wrapped before it goes anywhere. A typical rear extension or lean-to runs somewhere between 8 and 20 sheets depending on its size, and a roof that size comes off in most of a working day rather than dragging across a week.

Larger and higher roofs change the planning rather than the method. A two-storey extension roof, a tall workshop or a flat-roof addition behind one of the bigger Hangleton houses needs proper access, which usually means a tower or scaffold and a safe edge before any sheet moves. The Regency and conservation streets near the front bring their own version of this, where listed-building care and tight access have to be sorted before the job runs. Soffits, gutters and fascias are taken down in the same controlled way, board by board.

With the asbestos cleared, the roof gets put back. Galvanised steel box-profile is the common swap for a shed or extension, light and quick to fit over the existing timbers. A flat-roof extension is better suited to three-layer torch-on felt, which gives a sealed finish on a low pitch. Asbestos-free fibre cement is there if you want to keep the original look on a period outbuilding, and a tiled finish works where the pitch is steep enough to carry it. Soffits and fascias go back in modern uPVC that needs no painting. Most jobs need no skip, since the wrapped sheets go straight onto the van and off to a licensed disposal site, so the drive and the road stay clear throughout.